I thought you would enjoy this quote from a Cricinfo article today: â€œKaif was cruising on 91 when Panesar stunned him with a Youtube momentâ€.

How soon before â€œa YouTube momentâ€ joins the verb â€œto Googleâ€ in the dictionary?

As you would expect, I did two things. I googled “YouTube moment” and found it returned just under 18,000 hits. Then I went to YouTube, found this video and watched it. Looks like the Test series coming up will be interesting. Incidentally, I fail the Tebbit test spectacularly. I watch and support England every chance I get, have even had the good fortune to have been at two Ashes-clinching tests. But when they play India, things are different. it’s not Tebbit but Thatcher I land up following. TINA. India.

[The video is also on my VodPod in the sidebar in case you want to watch it later. I use VodPod to liberate the video link from the post].

On to the real point that Dom was making. YouTube moment as a neologism. Until Dom’s post, I never quite realised how useful the web is for tracking neologisms, one can almost associate a nascent phrase with a buzz factor and watch it grow. Or die.

And that set me thinking. YouTube moment. Whatever next? A FaceBook romance? A Flickr opportunity?

4 thoughts on “Musing about YouTube moments”

The YouTube moment is more than a mere neologism; it’s about the clearest reminder of how times have changed. It’s just about 10 years since an entry by Kodak — a Kodak moment — won a media Gold at Cannes, arguably the greatest recognition in the field.
The YouTube moment, even when called a moment, is a few seconds or perhaps even a minute long. The Kodak moment was just a frame, with the “seconds” preceding and following the moment left to the imagination of the reader — the YouTube moment leaves one with no work to do.
Can we return “moment” to Kodak and christen the YouTube whatever afresh, please?

Don’t want to return “moment” to Kodak, not unless it was theirs in the first place. And I’m unconvinced of their possession.

I think “moment” has richer meanings; even Chambers allows its use from “a point in time” to “a short while”. The particular usage I recall, that of “waiting for his big moment”, sustains the definition. My OED is awaiting unpacking so I can’t check the detail.

My guess would be that it is the use of the word Kodak that qualifies “moment” into “a single frame”; maybe, when qualified by YouTube, it can be ” a short while” after all.

JP, I think you are confusing usage with commercial sloganeering. A “Kodak moment” was an instant when you thought either “Gee, I wish I had brought my camera” or “Thank God I have my camera with me!” Kodak was basically selling you on the idea that you should always carry your camera. (Perhaps this campaign was never mounted on your side of the pond.) Little did they know what the cell phone would to do that injunction! Now the persuasion has escalated to the level of video capture,